Poetry Wars - Colin Wells Early American Studies

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the same faith in the power of poetry to intervene in the struggle between competing texts—proclamations issued by royal governors, on the one hand, and counterproclamations by state assemblies or by Congress, on the other—would continue unabated, ultimately extending beyond the specific fashion for penning versifications. For if the form’s negation of authoritative language opened space for rival claims to authority by ascendant colonial officials (with the most famous example being the Declaration of Independence), Loyalist poets seeking to invalidate such claims would need a counterstrategy of their own. That strategy, importantly, would involve reviving a different subgenre of eighteenth-century verse, one that communicated a negation of the rebel’s claims as well as a symbolic reaffirmation of the old order.

       Satirizing the “Word” of Congress

      As a literary form that enacted symbolic resistance by an anonymous public against the professed power of a governor or military commander, the versification proved wholly suitable for conveying the rebel or insurgent position, both before and during the war. Yet if one purpose of the versification form was to help open the way for popular declarations issued by town meetings and state assemblies, it seemed likely that British or Loyalist poets would recognize a similar capacity in the versification’s ability to invalidate the claims of such directives.

      And indeed, a few British and Loyalist versifiers joined the fray, including the anonymous poet who, in 1774, first defined the penchant for verse parody as a literary “vogue.” At the moment Gage was waging his first discursive war against the Massachusetts “Solemn League and Covenant,” similar leagues, assemblies, and committees of correspondence were forming in neighboring colonies, and in the late summer of 1774, these disparate bodies appointed delegates to what they styled a “Grand Continental Congress.” Among the Congress’s first official acts was drafting the Articles of Association, which announced a collective protest against the Coercive Acts and a general boycott on importation and consumption of British goods. As if in mirror image of the anti-Gage parodies, the articles were parodied and set to music by the pseudonymous wit “Bob Jingle” in a twenty-two-page pamphlet The Association, &c. of the Delegates of the Colonies, at the Grand Congress, Held at Philadelphia, Sept. 1, 1774, Versified, and adapted to Music.

      As Philip Gould points out in his recent analysis of The Association, whatever political and ideological intentions Bob Jingle had for the work, his introduction focuses chiefly on matters of taste and aesthetics; the recent fashion for versification, he explains, is an outgrowth of the “reigning taste” for transforming the “plain prose” of political texts into verse. Yet if the mention of the proliferation of verse parodies implied a parallel between this work and the many anti-Gage versifications that had recently appeared, The Association was a very different kind of parody. Part of the difference arose from the disparity between the claims to power being made in the respective parodied documents: whereas Gage’s proclamations derived their authority from the king and demanded implicit submission from their readers/subjects, the Articles of Association was a work of persuasion, an attempt to rally the people into resisting Parliament. In this sense, the text of the Articles themselves served to block at least one fundamental strategy of the versification as a form, to symbolize resistance against an assertion of authority.12

      To be sure, the Articles rested on several radical and potentially problematic assumptions that made them vulnerable to satire. They assumed, first and foremost, that the “Grand Congress” was a perfect representation the people (which the very existence of Loyalists contradicted), and they also assumed those very people possessed rights that contradicted the will of the king and Parliament. At the same time, these assumptions lay buried beneath the more emphatic language of petition, as well as an early and frequent insistence that the delegates remained “his Majesty’s most loyal subjects.” Perhaps as a result, the satiric thrust of The Association bypasses the issue of the Congress’s legitimacy; instead it focuses on exposing the “true” character and motives of the delegates themselves, representing them as a drunken and unruly demos that stubbornly resists all taxes, however justifiable, and outrageously defends its “Right” to “rob and plunder others” by trafficking in smuggled goods. By taking the additional step of setting his versification to music and organizing it as a kind of dramatic set piece (complete with an opening song, a recitative, and a chorus), the author thus produced a work that was less a parody of a congressional document than a comic opera aimed at ridiculing the Americans as incapable of governing themselves responsibly:

      And if you still despise our Speeches,

      Eftsoons we’ll make you sh-t your Breeches.

      The Parliament shall straight repeal,

      All Tax-Acts on our Common-Weal;

      All Acts imposing Dues or Custom,

      For which we’ve bully’d, cheated, curst ’em;

      The Act on Tea, by which our Ribs,

      And Daughters have told many Fibs;

      The Tax on Wine, which warms and mellows,

      And makes us now such Bravo-Fellows;

      That, on Molasses we bring home,

      For this affects our favorite Rum.

      The satiric emphasis here, as Gould shows, is on debasing the cultural position of the rebels rather than attacking the radical act of invoking an organized association of colonies with a common strategy of resistance. One reason for this may be that the Congress of 1774 did not appear a significant threat to British authority; indeed, by the time The Association appeared in print, the Congress had already dissolved. This was not the case, however, in the following year, after the outbreak of war necessitated the calling of a second Congress, which by the summer of 1775 was operating as a full-fledged countergovernment and competing with royal governors and military commanders for the people’s assent. This is the point that the strategy of anti-Congress versifications would turn to the perceived illogic of the Congress’s claim to legitimacy.13

      This shift is evident in a variation on the versification form published in the London Public Advertiser under the heading “The following Abstract of the Resolves of the General Congress, assembled at Philadelphia in 1775, is put into Metre, for the help of weak Memories.” Significant, first, as a reminder that the fashion for versifications was a transatlantic phenomenon, this poem departs from Bob Jingle’s emphasis on the character of the rebels as well as the Patriot versifiers’ emphasis on parodying a specific document. As the title suggests, the poem is more a general abstract of Congress’s resolves than a parody of a specific document; yet it nevertheless works in a similar way, listing a series of caricatured resolutions that are meant to undermine the validity of Congress’s specific critiques, and more fundamentally, the justification of its existence as a governing body: “The Congress Resolves to acknowledge the King, / But not to obey him in any one Thing: / RESOLVES—That the Parliament’s guilty of Treason, / For trying to bring the Bostonians to Reason.” The larger point is that in the course of issuing its resolutions, the Congress has tied itself in knots declaring that its members are, and are not, subject to the king’s authority. Variations on the theme of logical confusion permeate the poem, as in the following passage that cleverly plays out the circularity implicit in the claims issued by this so-called representative body: “RESOLV’D, in the People that Power does dwell, / Who have vested in us their Right to rebel: / ’Tis therefore determin’d by Sov’reign Command, / That these our RESOLVES are the Laws of the Land.”14 The authority of the Congress, in other words, rests on its power to rebel, which is to say, on its power to refuse to assent to precisely the sort of resolutions as its members themselves were issuing. This argument would seem all the more prescient the following year, when the same Congress issued the Declaration of Independence.

      Unlike the earlier popular declarations by committees of correspondence, state assemblies, and the First Congress, which had been reticent about laying claim to a level of political authority that rivaled that of the king or Parliament, the Declaration was audacious: not only did it lay claim to precisely such power, it went further, effectively speaking the United States of America into existence.

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